Alright, so it wasn’t exactly an interview, it was the last episode official YOI web radio called Yuri on Radio, which you can listen to here. (Unless the videos get deleted which happens quite a lot, but it’s still there at the time of writing). Regardless of what you want to call it, it featured a few questions to Kubo (who, as you know, is the author of the story to YOI) and her answers and I’d like to deliver them to you.
Note: This is only a rough translation, not a word for word translation, though it should hopefully convey the most relevant information. Feel free to correct me if you think I got something wrong!
With that out of the way, let’s dive into the most important/interesting questions and answers.
Okay, so this first bit isn’t really a question, but more of a fun fact
from behind the scenes but let me keep the format similar to the rest of the post:
The seiyuu received manga drafts from Kubo to use as
references before recording sessions to better understand the characters. At
first they were around 70 pages long (around the first episode) but by the last
episode, there were about 120-130 pages of manga dedicated to each episode.
The manga drafts were essentially drafts for the episodes and Kubo and Yamamoto
had to carefully select the content they wanted to include in the anime because
unfortunately there was too much she wanted to show in just 23 minutes per
episode. Kubo said that it was a difficult choice because there were many
scenes that she wanted to be animated but a number of them had to be thrown
away and never used in the anime.
[I know that some people will ask so let me say: I doubt
that the manga draft they made for references will ever be fully published. I’m
assuming it wasn’t a proper manga and more like sketches with speech bubbles
that look nothing like the neat little volumes you may usually purchase. It
wasn’t meant to be beautiful, only useful to the seiyuu and it was a way of
presenting stories with which Kubo was most comfortable and which she found the
easiest to create.]
How close is Kubo with Yamamoto (the director) and how long have they
known each other?
They haven’t known each other very long; Yamamoto approached
her in the Summer of 2014, asking whether she would like to write a story for a
figure skating anime. In the Summer of 2015 they met practically every day in
Kubo’s place to create the story and often ended up cooking and eating together
(she explained it by saying that they got so excited over writing it that it
made them hungry lol). Kubo also highlighted that Yamamoto has great love for
anime and for figure skating and she was glad to work with her and create Yuri
on Ice with Yamamoto’s advice and her help in terms of details.
Why was Hasetsu (based on Karatsu in Saga, Kyushu) chosen as Yuuri’s
hometown?
There are few famous figure skaters from Kyushu and Kubo
wanted to show such unlikely origins for a famous skater for a change, and also
wanted to present Yuuri as the ‘hope of the region’. She also hoped to make it a generic
town where you could find anywhere (which would make it relatable and easy to
picture for many viewers). She also thought that making it into a town located
around a castle would leave a good impression (and would look nice to
foreigners watching the show). So they searched the region and finally chose Karatsu as the perfect basis for creating
Hasetsu. Up till now Karatsu wasn’t a famous travel location (being rather old
and small and offering nothing special in particular), but it seems that the
anime is already inviting more tourists to the city (which apparently was also
what they hoped for).
Who was the easiest character to draw?
Kubo didn’t hesitate to say that it was JJ. She felt like
she knew exactly how he would look and act so putting it down on paper was
essentially simple. She said that Yurio was also quite easy to draw.
Now what’s interesting is that Kubo said that Yurio was the first character she came up
with but they decided that they couldn’t make him the main character because “he
couldn’t pull the story along”. He didn’t have any clear weaknesses the way
Yuuri did, he didn’t have the desire to get involved with others or the
predisposition to interact with other people the way Yuuri did, and they
realized that the story progressed and developed much better when they paired
Victor and Yuuri and the narrative began partly depending on them. She said
that Yuri on Ice became what it was thanks to the decision to focus on Yuuri
instead of Yurio (because they couldn’t find a good way to move the story forward with Yurio as
the MC). She also said that Yurio was more of a tragic character and if he was
the main character then the anime would become a sad story and they wanted to
prevent that. They preferred to make it into a story overflowing with
love. They chose not to speak about Yurio’s family in the anime in order not to
give him a handicap and instead showed his relationships with many people who
would support and help him in the future. She also said she wished she could
show more of Yurio and Otabek’s friendship and she had a few scenes in mind but
in the last episodes she had to cut out all of the lines that weren’t
absolutely necessary. She said that she actually wanted to include many more
scenes for many of the characters but it was a story about Yuuri Katsuki after
all and she wanted to prioritize it in the end.
That’s about that for the relevant information, although they did mention the big seiyuu event featuring Kubo that will take place on April 29th, 2017, and, I presume, will also include some announcement regarding the second season.
I hope you found this post informative! Thanks for reading!
“Regardless of how people in the real world feel about this work, inside the world of this show, there will be absolutely no discrimination toward the things one loves. I will absolutely protect this world.”
CAN WE PLEASE JUST SEND KUBO-SENSEI A THANK YOU MESSAGE FOR YURI!!! ON ICE BECAUSE OF THIS. BLESSSSS.
Yet another interview from Pash! Dec. issue. This is also with Mitsurou Kubo, it’s basically an “extra” of the commentary that I posted the other day, with a few other random questions & facts all very interesting as usual. By the way, this is were it was first confirmed that Yuuri and Victor speak English to each other (which is something Japanese people had been wondering for a while).
Same as in the last translation, italic/bold parts are recreating how the original article was, I didn’t decide where to add them myself.
***If you wish to share this translation please do it by reblogging or posting a link to it*** ***Re-translating into other languages is ok but please mention that this post is the source***
Mitsurou Kubo Q&A There’s still more behind the scenes! We are bringing you a few more curiosities and anecdotes in Q&A format.
Q: Why are there so many scenes about SNS? A: Actual skaters love SNS too, and there are quite a few of them who post really often. The director and I always enjoy looking at their posts every day. We created the ED in the image of Instagram and photos posted on the SNS. We are also thinking of ending some episodes with SNS style pictures, I hope you’ll enjoy.
Q: Is Yuuri on the SNS too? A: Yuuri is the type who gets an account but then never updates it. He doesn’t really check it. He doesn’t want to be bashed, and thinks that the fans’ passionate cheering is a bit annoying. He’s really terrible at dealing with fans. But lots of people around him are SNS lovers, so you can spot him in their posts (LOL).
Q: What do you especially pay attention to in this work? A: First of all, we were talking with director Yamamoto about the fact that no matter how you perfectly animate the skating scenes, if viewers don’t feel like cheering for an athlete they will never sympathize with them. That’s why until episode 4 we have spent time meticulously showing the interaction between Yuuri Katsuki and Victor Nikiforov in Yuuri’s hometown.
Q: What language do Yuuri and the others speak with each other? A: Yuuri and Victor fundamentally speak English with each other. Yuuri studied in Detroit, so actually he can speak English very well. Isn’t that cool? (LOL)
Q: Tell us something about the episode titles, which are always quite striking. A: I thought them all before writing the storyboards. The flow of the story was already roughly decided, but we had to present the titles at the meeting first of all. If I remember correctly, director Yamamoto and I thought up all 12 titles in Tokyo station, after returning from a trip to collect data (LOL). We decided episode 1 because it sounded nice, and since we had started with that kind of title we felt like we should continue with the same trend for all others too. But I guess it’s no use to act cool in the end (LOL).
Q: About “that” line. A: The lines centered around “(the theme is) love” in episode 5 are actually something that I came up with for the recording script that was used in the cast audition, before writing the storyboard. I used the same words in the actual episode.
Q: What memories do you have of the location hunting? A: I really like the Russian representative pair skater Yuko Kavaguti. I had never gotten an autograph from an athlete before, but when we went to see the GP Final in Barcelona last year, after the exhibition the director and I spotted her signing autographs, and we got one too. We told her “We really like you!!” (LOL), and she replied “ooh, really?” with a lovely voice like a little bird, that made me so happy.
Q: Where did you go location hunting? A: We went to China, Russia and Spain, also to watch the matches. It was about 5 days for each match.
Q: What did you have trouble with during location hunting? A: We could never get appointments. In Russia we went to see the tournament in Moscow and we also went to St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg there is a famous sport club called Yubileyny, to which Plushenko and Yagudin also belong, and we tried going there even though we weren’t expecting much. Director Yamamoto was really nice and asked whether we could take a look inside, but of course… they didn’t allow us to… While we were taking pictures of the exterior we were told that now it was being remodeled and the main athletes were in another place. We tried to go there too, but again we were told that the public is not allowed inside. We still tried searching for some place we could take a look at, and we came upon a dining room. Inside there were a few Russian female athletes. We got a little hyper and were like “skaters training inside actually come here too!!” “they’re only drinking water!!”. We kept on visiting the place, trying to see all areas that were accessible to the public. In Moscow we went to CSKA, which is where Radionova is based, but here too we were not allowed to visit. So basically in the whole GP series we weren’t able to see even one back yard. Overseas you can take pictures in the main arena, so director Yamamoto, the manager and I positioned ourselves in different spots and did our best to take as many pictures as possible. We seriously had to do everything by ourselves. When we tried to go at the back we got excited because once again we could enter the dining room (LOL). Every time it was like that.
Q: What kind of place is Hasetsu? A: Hasetsu is a fictional town in Kyushu. In Kyushu there are actual skate rinks too, but we reckoned that if we used one of those it would become difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. We did most of the location hunting in Karatsu, Saga prefecture. There’s a castle too because we figured a foreigner would like that. In Saga there is a film commission, so we also went there to officially ask for cooperation. As soon as we enter the GP series they never go back to Hasetsu, but in the beginning we showed a lot of “rural*” life. We wanted it to become a place that you could look back at and think “those were fun times”. [*translator’s note: You may think that Hasetsu is a normal town, but in Japan everything that’s not big metropolitan city is basically considered “countryside”]
Q: We would like to know how you created the performances in the series! A: We first had a meeting with the composer (Keisuke) Tominaga-san, in which the director and I participated too, and afterwards he sent us samples of about 200 songs. Kenji-sensei then gave us comments for all the songs, like “this sounds European”, “this is something an American skater would use”, “this one won’t work”. It sounds very convincing when it’s a choreographer saying it. After that the director and I did a further brush-up and chose the songs among the existing samples that sounded more similar to what we were looking for, we asked to create the actual songs, then we asked Kenji-sensei to create choreographies for them, and finally we had him perform said choreographies and filmed him with lots of cameras. Kenji-sensei listened to our explanation and told us to tell him if we had anything to say about the choreographies. He created all of them within a limited amount of time, even though the story was not fully decided in detail yet. And despite that, in the tournament scenes it happened a lot of times that the choreographies perfectly matched the scenes and made the monologues sound even more fitting, it was really magical. When I got to the point of writing the storyboard I realized once again how important the role of Kenji-sensei has been.
Nothing but My Aching Soul 